Asking for Love

by Robinson, Roxana;

  That night when Melissa came home from seeing her father she walked loudly past my door. I called good night, but she didn’t answer. I heard her door shut hard, like a blow.

  The next day my parents, my sister, Gail, and her husband, Ted, and their twins were coming for Thanksgiving dinner. I let Melissa sleep late, and when I finally knocked on her door, there was just time for her to get up and set the table. I’d done everything else. When I called her name, she answered “Yes?” on a rising, formal note, as though she were in a hotel and I were the maid. I stood in the hall outside her closed door, my head bent. I didn’t dare go in. I called out the plans to her. I knew she was there, alive, awake, listening to her mother’s voice, but she didn’t answer.

  She came downstairs dressed for dinner, in a white high-necked blouse and a long skirt. Her hair was polished and shining, hanging down her back like a length of satin. She looked the way she used to: warm and sweet, radiant and responsive. She went straight in to the dining room and began setting the table, spreading out the big white linen cloth with my grandmother’s initials on it, laying the places with my grandmother’s heavy old-fashioned silver. She put out the crystal water goblets that she’d once been too small to hold upright; she folded the linen napkins in neat long triangles. At my mother’s place she stood the little Chinese porcelain figure that we always put before the most honored guest. I felt calmed: no matter how she felt toward me, Melissa was taking her place in our family. She was performing our ritual with our familiar things—old silver, worn linen, and faded china. She was setting forth our symbols in a calligraphy that she knew well, a pattern that stood in our household for festivity and love, and she was honoring this.

  “The table looks beautiful,” I said, coming in to admire. But as I spoke, Melissa slipped past me, back into the kitchen. I followed her. “Thanks, Liss,” I said, but she was standing at the open refrigerator, looking for something to eat for breakfast. Her back was to me, and she did not answer.

  I could have said something sharp. I could have said Now-see-here, and You-listen-to-me-young-lady. There have been times when I’ve said those things, and maybe I should have then. But I didn’t have the heart. All I could demand from Melissa was the form of love, only courtesy, its husk, and I didn’t care about that. If Melissa hates me, I don’t care if she’s polite. Love is what I want from Melissa, and I won’t ask for it. Asking for love is the saddest question in the world, and if you have to ask, the answer is too painful to hear. So I said nothing. It took the heart from me to see her so cold and distant, filled with animosity.

  I just hoped that when the others came, Melissa would be nicer, and she was. She kissed my white-haired, straight-backed parents, and my gabby sister, Gail, and her family. She asked my father about his stargazing and my mother about her garden club. She sat on the rug with Gail’s twins and played a clapping game that made them weak and floppy with laughter. I talked a lot, as though everything were fine, and I hoped that everything actually was. I hoped Melissa was beginning to relax, expand, like one of those folded-paper flowers you set into a glass of water—that she would feel herself cherished in this warm bath of family affection, and would gracefully unfurl, revealing her deep and vivid colors and the form of her lovely spirit. I hoped that she would remember who she was and who I was, why she was here.

  At dinner Melissa was ebullient. She teased my father and asked the twins riddles. The sound of Melissa’s laughter was wonderful to me, and the sight of her open smile. When I asked the girls to clear, after the turkey, Melissa stood up and looked sternly at the twins.

  “Okay, you two,” she said. “No giggling.” Thrilled, they started giggling at once. I went out into the kitchen to scrape the plates, and Melissa followed me. As she came through the swinging door, I saw her face in the small glass window. She was laughing at something my father had said, and as she pushed the door with her shoulder, she called back to him.

  “I’ll bet you did,” Melissa said loudly, grinning.

  Her face, in the tiny window, was lit up with light from the kitchen. It was radiant, the face I loved, and I was so thankful. Here was Melissa, back at last, beautiful and candid, with her smooth pale cheeks, her wide cheerful mouth, her shining eyes. Seeing her own exuberant smile, I smiled myself.

  The door swung through, and Melissa found herself in a different room, face to face—and alone—with her mother. At the sight of me her face was transformed, vividly, instantly, like a sheet of paper blackened by flame. Her laughter stopped and her mouth cramped and tightened. Her eyes went cold and angry. It was like a cruel magic trick, a bright vision of the past Melissa brutally erased by the way she was now. I stood in front of her, still smiling, as her face blackened with rage and contempt. As I watched, my own face stiffened, foolishly, painfully. It was like a splash of acid in my eyes. I turned back to the sink to hide my foolish face.

  All winter Melissa made long-distance calls to Michael, from boarding school, and charged them to me. She wants me to pay, literally, for what I’ve done. But in the spring, things had improved, and I had hopes for the summer. After two months of being together, things will be better still.

  “She was upset,” I said now to John. “You can hardly blame her. That was our first Thanksgiving after Michael left.”

  “I know that,” John said. “I just mean that’s the kind of thing you tell me about her.”

  It hurt for John to mention this, so casually. And it also seemed that John was reminding me of my glaring flaws as a mother, and of Melissa’s glaring flaws as a daughter. I felt that I was meant to compare Melissa with the docile and decorous Julia, properly raised by a Good Mother, and that I was meant to feel chastened.

  “Well,” I said firmly, “Melissa is wonderful. You’ll see.”

  John smiled, raising his eyebrows. “I’m sure she is,” he said gallantly. “She’s your daughter.”

  I smiled back. We picked up our menus and John frowned as he scanned. “What are you going to have?” he asked.

  “The duck,” I said, “only is this the kind I like?” I can never remember if it’s magret or confit.

  “I don’t know,” John said affably. “Is it?”

  I looked up, and from his expression I realized that John had no idea which kind of duck I like. It’s Michael, my husband of twenty years, who knows this. I felt shocked and guilty, to have so easily confused my lover with my husband. It seemed both cavalier and chilling, a fatally telling slip that must show the superficiality of my feelings. And it grieved me: you know so much about your husband, you have such a vast collection of random and important facts about him—that he loves Melville and kidneys, that he hates sweetbreads and the ballet—and he knows these things about you. Jointly you own this secret, intimate, trivial knowledge. It’s comforting, this charting of the particularities of your own existence on someone else’s map.

  But the shared knowledge between Michael and myself is now useless, poisoned. I relinquished my claim to it, as I gave up my claim to Michael’s affection. Michael now detests his knowledge of me, and the knowledge John and I share is meager. We are still hardly visible to each other’s eyes, we are still only silhouettes, barely defined by gleams on our rounded edges.

  But forward is how you go, and John and I are learning each other. Each time we’re together we chart unknown territory, exploring newfound lands through loving invasion. And as for the duck, it was time I remembered what I liked myself.

  “Magret,” I said, at random. “That’s the one I like.”

  “Good,” said John peacefully. “Have it.”

  After we ordered, I asked, “Now tell me, how does Julia like it here?”

  “I think she likes it all right,” John said cautiously.

  Julia is a frail, timid creature, with wispy hair and narrow shoulders. She seems disheartened by the world, as though she has tried it and found it too much for her.

  “Is she in sailing class?” I asked. This is the core of childhood in this coa
stal community. It starts with rowing, for six-year-olds, and goes up to racing and overnight cruises for teenagers.

  “She is. I think she likes it,” said John.

  “I hope so. Melissa loved it. I loved it,” I said, and then wondered if I had. I think now that I loved it, but maybe this is nostalgia. Maybe at the time I hated it. Melissa tells me now that her childhood was miserable. Memory is kaleidoscopic: the slightest shift creates another picture, detailed, complete, convincing. Who can say what childhood was really like? We cling to the view we’ve chosen. But I think that I really did love sailing class: the cold, taut line against my strong hand, and the damp, fresh wind in my face. Hunkering down in the well of the little boat with my best friend, setting out across the choppy water toward Sutton Island as though it were the Peloponnese. There must have been cold weather and high winds, fights and feuds, but I don’t remember them. Now those days seem full of exultation. I wondered what Melissa would say now, about sailing class. I wondered what she would say, years later, about her parents’ divorce.

  John looked judicious. “Well, Agnes isn’t crazy about sailing. She may want Julia to do tennis instead.”

  “She can do both,” I said officiously. “We all did. But why doesn’t Agnes like sailing?”

  “It’s pretty strenuous. Four hours, out in the cold wind, three days a week. And what if she fell in?”

  “But did Agnes just find out now that it was four hours, three days a week? Didn’t you register Julia months ago?”

  John took a drink of water. “I think Agnes just focused on it. She called this morning, and she was concerned. And I must say I think she has a point.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Well, children have managed it somehow, for generations. With very few fatalities.”

  John sighed. “Sarah, Agnes is Julia’s mother. I think she knows what’s best for Julia. She is a very responsible mother, you know. She sees things differently from you.”

  It’s true that Agnes sees things differently from the way I do. To start with, I would not call abandoning your child in favor of graduate school a demonstration of maternal responsibility. John, however, defends everything Agnes does. “She was unhappy,” he explains, about her abandoning him and Julia. John defends Agnes because, though she has left him, she won’t leave him alone. She won’t let him be angry: she calls him her best friend. They talk every day, and she comes over to his house all the time. John calls this mature. I call it dishonest.

  “Agnes and I see most things differently,” I said. “Not only how to treat your daughter but also your ex-husband.”

  “First of all, Sarah, I am not Agnes’s ex-husband. Agnes and I are not divorced,” John said, precise. “And second of all, I must tell you that you sound just the faintest bit jealous. Agnes and I have been very fortunate, and we have worked very hard. We have managed to maintain our friendship despite our separation, which few people seem able to do. This makes things much easier on Julia, to say nothing of being easier on us. And I’ll tell you that I’m very grateful to Agnes for making this possible.” He sounded incredibly smug.

  “I’m not jealous,” I said, irritated. “What Agnes has made possible is the end of your marriage. Why are you grateful to her?”

  John took a swallow of his drink. “I see this as a little more complex than that,” he said primly.

  “Agnes wants it both ways,” I said. “She wants to leave her husband without accepting the consequences.”

  “I didn’t realize you were an expert on what my wife wants,” John said, cool. “And what are the consequences?”

  “The consequences of divorce? How can you ask? Her guilt. Your anger.”

  “Well, but we aren’t divorced. And I’m not angry at Agnes,” John said, pleased.

  “But why aren’t you?” I asked.

  John shook his head. “I understand her,” he said, and smiled loftily, as though he were a philosopher and I were a hysterical shrew.

  “She is selfish and cruel,” I said. “What is there to understand?”

  There was an angry silence. I was furious: Why did he keep calling Agnes his wife? Why did he defend her? But I said nothing more: For one thing, I know I shouldn’t criticize Agnes to John, it’s low-grade behavior. I have to trust John to make his own way through this, and I know he will. Besides, maybe I am jealous. And I also kept quiet because I particularly didn’t want to quarrel that night. So I waited until I could smile at him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t very nice.”

  John looked at me gravely and patted my hand. “Thank you.”

  In Philadelphia, at night, John and I always went to my house. We were alone there, with Melissa away. The first time he came was difficult for me: I felt invaded, John’s footsteps in Michael’s house, his strange new body in my marriage bed. I had to close my eyes to shut out the thoughts of invasion, to shut out those sickening thoughts of guilt and regret and nostalgia. But I had to, I had to let my house and marriage be invaded: my marriage was over, and both my house and I must receive my guests. I closed my eyes and hurled myself into the moment, into John, like a moth into a flame, hoping he was hot enough.

  Afterward we lay peacefully tangled up in each other. I was proud of us both, for pushing past that anxiety, for insisting on happiness. I ran my hand up and down along John’s shoulder. When I felt him sit up, I opened my eyes. His back was to me, and he was picking up his clothes.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He didn’t turn around. “Getting dressed.”

  “Are you leaving?”

  “I’m afraid I have to,” said John. I waited, and finally he said, “Julia wakes up in the night a lot. I don’t want her to find me gone if she does.”

  I thought of Julia’s frightened call in the empty hallway, the light shining on the polished floor, the silence of the late-night house. I thought of John’s big, calming presence. I couldn’t argue. Who would let a child cry alone?

  Still. “What about Hannah?” I asked.

  John’s voice was now distant. “I don’t want Julia to wake in the night and find me gone,” he repeated, testy.

  I said nothing: one more question and we would be fighting. I lay there, watching him dress and feeling abandoned. I pulled the sheet up over my nakedness so that if he turned, he would not find me unprotected.

  Each time we made love I hoped that this time he would stay. I hoped he would feel so blissfully depleted, so cherished, so safe, that his reasons for leaving would dissolve. I hoped this time he would fall trustingly asleep in my arms, next to my beating heart, and I would have him with me all through the dark hours of the night.

  Tonight, here, this would finally happen, and it was John himself who had planned it. Julia was staying with a friend, and John had boldly told the baby-sitter that he’d be back in the morning. My parents were gone, and Melissa doesn’t appear before noon. I felt John was drawing himself up for that step into the spinning air, and I was proud.

  That afternoon I had opened one of the guest rooms. It was a big square room, musty and silent, with slanting eaves and faded flower-sprigged wallpaper. I turned down the bedspread and plumped up the heavy pillows, which, in that house at the edge of the water, were always cool, always faintly damp. I pushed open the small diamond-paned windows and stood in the silent room while the soft air flowed in past me, lifting the white curtains and letting them drop. I thought of how it would be, later on, the two of us sinking into the softness of that strange bed. I closed my eyes: the faded Victorian room in the dim light, John looming over me, putting his hands where he pleased, the two of us skin to skin among those soft ancient sheets. I thought of seeing him in the early morning, in that muted light still empty of color. I thought of waking to find the warmth of his body, the rich smell of him, of us, all around me. That was what lay ahead of us, and I wouldn’t let anything threaten it. I wouldn’t argue now with anything John said.

  When we left the restaurant I paused, balancing on t
he edge of the sidewalk, and took a deep, peaceful breath of the night air. The village was silent, and the great black sky went straight up forever. The world spread out around us, dark and rich, and the night that waited was sweet. We didn’t talk on the way home; we didn’t need to.

  Melissa’s window was dark as we drove past. John parked the car and turned off the engine but didn’t move. I turned to him, but he was staring straight ahead. I knew what he was thinking about. “Did you leave this number with the babysitter, in case Julia calls?” I asked.

  “Actually …” John said. He still was not looking at me, he was looking into the black thicket of pine trees. When I heard the tone of his voice, I closed my eyes: I didn’t want to hear what he was going to say.

  We sat in silence. The space in the car had turned cold and claustrophobic; there was no longer quite enough air for us both.

  Finally I said, “Actually?”

  “Actually,” John repeated, “I meant to tell you before.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  John turned to look at me. “Now, don’t fly into a rage,” he said, smiling. His voice was affectionate, paternal. He made rage sound absurd and childish, something I should be ashamed of flying into.

  I said nothing.

  John reached out and took my boneless hand. He patted it. “I’m sorry to let you down.”

  “What happened?” I kept my voice neutral and wondered why I was the only one to be let down.